Welcome to our Garden Blog

Welcome to Life & Learning, a site dedicated to all school gardeners who are interested in offering food and fantastic experiential learning opportunities in any type of school setting. This blog welcomes all past, present and future school gardeners to share their experiences, thoughts and challenges in running a school garden program and/or farm-to-school initiative in their community.

To focus the discussion, the members of our middle school garden project will write articles, post interesting gardening tricks and short instructional videos for classroom use. If you have any interest in bio-dynamic gardening, experiential & place based learning, improving your connection with all students and believe that school improvement is based on character and intellectual development, then this may be the blog for you.

Jon Thurston Says:March 19th, 2007 at 6:07 am Things are really growing in the greenhouse! Coming from a cooler greenhouse situation we planted hanging petunias in early January from seed. Many are starting to flower already. Soon they can be purchased and hung outside during the day and brought in on nights below 35 F. Petunias are fairly tough plants and can thrive at cool temperatures if acclimated properly.

gardenproject Says: March 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm The Garden Project Team gave two community presentations last week. One to the Master Gardener’s Association at their annual banquet. Our presentation lasted a bit over an hour and included a movie, slide show, some good talk on pest control and a great meal (the best part)! The second presentation was to the Belfast Rotary and also included a nice meal with fresh greens and homemade lasagna. We are continually so impressed with how well composed and prepared the students are when they are talking about their own learning experiences at our school.Next we’re off to the Tremont School to kick off a new gardening program at their school. We expect great things from them.Mr. T.

The weekly worm was good. I liked how much information the students put into it and that I learned some things I didn’t know. Very nice collection of pictures. Great job to you Emily for getting your writing on compost tea published.

The Weekly Worm was very well written. It had so much good information about what we do here in the garden and how different so many of the activities are. I liked the fact that it had pictures about what the author was talking about. I want to say a special nice job to Emily Blood who wrote a very good article in this Weekly Worm. Was that a refractometer in your hand?

This brochure is very, very nice. The reason that this brochure so good is because it has a good structure with columns, clear writing and good graphics. I am glad that I participate so many of these great projects even though I haven’t had a story published yet but some of my have. I’m proud of them!

This is a very good brochure about the garden project. I am glad that I was on the front cover!!! That was really a very fun activity tracting the temperature each morning. I thought that it was really fun both experiencing it and actually partcipating in something so innovative . I thought that the kids had good poses for the pictures, this shows us, the readers, that the person who took our pictures does his/ her job very well.

The Weekly Worm that was published this week has lots of interesting information on the garden project and what we have been learning. I think having a newspaper about what we have learned is a great idea. It gives the people that do not know about everything that’s going on, a place to find out about what they don’t know already. The Weekly Worm should continue to be published and have articles written by us.

Everyone who contributed to the brochure and blog and newsletter did a very good job. Everything about it was cohesive in every way, and the pictures were very good too. I hope many people get to see the brochure, it is very informative.

In the garden my job is Pest control manager. What I do is I spray the white flies and the aphids with winter green oil. It will often kill them but still many will get them away from the plants, so we also release parasitc wasps and lady bugs. They attack aphids and their eggs. I’ve even seen a lady bug eat an aphid under the USB microscope
I also find mummified aphids to pick off the plants and put next to others plants. The mummies are baby wasps that grow up inside the aphid’s body. The wasp will eat the inside of the aphid like an egg yolk and break out when it’s developed enough. The wasps help by killing the aphids and making more wasps by planting more eggs.
I would like to hear what other people are doing to control their own pests in greenhouses.

I was very impressed with our peers writing in the weekly worm. I think this is a really cool opportunity for the kids to express. I’m mainly impressed with the article on the Healthy Greens, mainly because it’s by me but also because I get the chance to write on something like this in school.

I am very impressed by the work done in the four season greenhouse. The temperature graph produced on datastudio is really good data. I hope anyone reading this blog will read about the greenhouse and the potential for growing greens year around.

The weekly worm was very well written. The students all did an excellent job on the articles. Emily, your article had plenty of information on the compost tea. Great job Brooklyn on your article explaining some of what we have done so far… it was in excellent detail. Keep it up everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The weekly worm was put together very nicely. I’m impressed with all of the information you give…although you did not have any pictures of me. If you could please put a picture of me in it my Mom would love it. THANKS, AJ :-)

I liked it a lot!
Although, I do agree with Steven that if it is called the Weekly Worm then why isn’t it produced every week??? I personally think that it should be something to do with monthly. Maybe the Monthly Mango or something else that is garden related would be a good title. Also, we need to create some more editing positions, editors may not catch everything!!!!

I think that the weekly worm is very interesting and that people could learn something from it. I looks like everyone did the best job EVER!!! There are very nice and interesting pictures in the weekly worm.
KEEP IT UP EVERyBODY!

I am very proud of my friends and fellow students for making the Weekly Worm possible. It is very detailed and all the pictures are great. It explains so much about the garden and now people who don’t know much about the THMS garden will know what we do and all our interesting activities!

In the next Weekly Worm I plan to have an article about cut flowers because I am in the seed divison and am a floral designer. Well, I can’t wait until next week to read our most recent Weekly Worm.
From Devon

It is so cool to have a brochure written by us kids! When I read it I learned stuff about our school I didn’t even know! But if it’s weekly, won’t we eventually run out of stuff to write about?
I’m in the seed division and I’m editor for the seed catalog, so I might be able to learn how to actually edit a catalog from the editors of the Weekly Worm. :)

This is great! It gives a lot of info that people who do not know much about the garden project might enjoy learning. Maybe some can even about learn from some of the things we learn on the garden project. I think it makes it better that the students put it together because it shows how much they are really learning in class. Every one did a nice job on their articles… Emily, Brooklyn, Kallee, Rochell, Forest, and everyone else please keep it up.

My job is to write thank you letters to people that have donated seeds and etc. to our garden project. I think that this site is really nice to have and is really good for the people to see what’s new with our garden. I make sure that the co op and other stores we advertise in, see what is new and what we have accomplish this year (so far) in the garden.
We really want people to see our garden project and what we are doing in this project. I think it is a good experience for us students to learn about the pros and cons about having a garden and what we need to make sure it is healthy for harvesting. Harvesting is really fun and there is a lot that I didn’t know. For example, like the type of insects that are bad for our garden (apihds & white flies) and will not make our garden healthy. Thats what I think that this site will let everyone know, different kinds of facts and what is new about the garden project!!!!!

My job is working in the Garden Division and helping in the Soup Kitchen. The brochure was put together very nicely. It’s fun to see other helpful websites on the sides of this blog so we can look at them at any time. It’s cool to see what some of the other students wrote in these articles and have it put up on the website to see what vthey are doing.
Brooke

I’ve done so much with the THMS garden project. My new job at the garden company is to work with the fish and cleaning the plants that are in the water and Mr.Tanguay said that we could make a pipe going up out of the water and have a plant at the top. It’s going to be really cool. We got a new bunny Ho-haw. He is so cute. He is black and white. His favorite food is parsley. We also have another bunny named Ebany. He is all black with white pause and a white spot on his chest. We also got chickens from Grant. They are pretty big. I think the garden project is a good idea for kids to learn about how to take care of plants and animals. I think all schools should do some kind of school activity because it is a really neat idea. We have a lot of different kinds of plants. It is really cool. We also made paper with pumpkin and all kinds of different things. I really like working with the garden project.

I think my school should begin taking the food scraps from our cafeteria for our compost. Almost every week we have salad from our garden as the lunch special and there is probably a lot left over that goes to waste.

I thought it was a very good video. I really like how u guys go outside and are hands on with nature. Just like your school we go outside and plant fruits and veggies. A project i would like to do is plant the same age and same seed in two different locations and water one more then the other and see how they differ!